Hi Wouter !
Thank you for taking the time to consider my arguments and for your comprehensive response. I agree with most of what you are writing and I am well aware that your request for Saterlandic is far more mature then many other pending Wikipedia language requests.
You're right, we might have slightly different ideas on what Wikipedia is all about. Let me briefly explain what it is to me.
You wrote:
> Its main goal is, of course, providing freely editable and downloadable
> information. A second aim is to create encyclopaedias in as many languages
> as possible.
I certainly agree with you there. And so does Wikipedia's claim "The Free Encyclopia".
But what is an encyclopia supposed to be? Me, I think any encyclopedia - printed or online - should serve as a _comprehensive_and_reliable_ source of information. Otherwhise it's useless. Imagine you go about looking up something in a printed encyclopedia only to find out it lacks some article it definetly ought to contain. I'd probably throw that book into the nearest trash can. Now how many articles does an encyclopedia need to be useful for the reader? I suppose the world's most renowned encyclopedias all contain 100,000+ articles. More compact versions do exist, but I seriously doubt that any book with less than 10,000 articles could ever provide a useful amount of information from all fields of knowledge. Moreover, I guess it could not even be called an encyclopedia in that case. My point is that when we set up a new language edition of Wikipedia, it should at least have a chance to became a "real encyclopia" one day. But then again, other people might have different !
ideas of what an encyclopedia is supposed to be. That's perfectly fine.
As you might have noticed already my concerns are not so much about your Saterlandic proposal in particular but rather about wikipedias for lesser used languages and their pros and cons in general. You correctly emphasize - and so did Mark - that the number of speakers is not the only and maybe not even the key factor in a Wikipedia's success or failure. If that was the case, Bengali with more than 100 million native speakers would be a huge thing, which obviously isn't so. No, it's far more complex than that (think about literacy, social prestige of the language, national/regional identity, literary tradition as opposed to mere oral usage, internet access, and so forth).
Still I think you just need minimum number of people with knowledge in various fields of knowledge to asure quality as well as quantity. Printed encyclopedias usually are the work of hundreds of editors. Paid, professional, full-time editors, nota bene! Can we really expect to succeed with far _fewer_ editors when they contribute on a volunteer basis in their short free time?
Boris
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hello,
downtime during the last ~2 hours (13-15 UTC) was caused by a power strip in
the colo blowing. switch/router and some machines were down, but the database
is unaffected. the site is now mostly up but may be unreliable / slow while
we finish working on it.
we're currently discussing options WRT better management & redundancy to
prevent this happening again in the future...
thanks,
kate.
(i should point out that this problem was entirely our fault, not the colo's,
and they were very helpful in bringing the site back online.
please follow up technical queries to wikitech-l rather than wikipedia-l).
Hey,
Is there any way to alter the alphabetical order used to sort
lists of articles? In the OE wiki, the letter æ (a and e together) should
be alphabetized after a, so that áetan, ániman, æfter show up in that
order, and ð and þ are arranged after d and t, respectively. There are also
accented vowels that should show up in their unaccented versions as well, so
that and, ániman, and ánlíepig are all under the letter A.
James
Forwarded to Wikipedia-l as requested by the author, who mistakenly
sent it only to me...
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Wouter Steenbeek <musiqolog(a)hotmail.com>
Date: Sat, 05 Mar 2005 00:00:13 +0100
Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] Saterlandic Frisian Wikipedia
To: stephen.forrest(a)gmail.com
>I believe you mean http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saterland_Frisian_language.
>
>For the purposes of ISO 639 codes, Saterland Frisian is regarded as a
>dialect of Frisian. Can you provide a rationale for why working
>within the Frisian Wikipedia is not tenable?
>
>I seem to recall reading that there were different spelling
>conventions for the Frisian spoken in Germany and that spoken in the
>Netherlands. I have no idea how significant these differences are.
>
>Steve
>_______________________________________________
>Wikipedia-l mailing list
>Wikipedia-l(a)Wikimedia.org
>http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
You were right: I used the wrong link. Just a matter of mental absence ;).
What is a dialect? There is a seperate Wiki for Aromanian, though it can
easily be classified as a Romanian dialect. There are Limburgish, Low Saxon
and Alemannic Wikis, though German and Dutch would do well for all three of
them. Some tend to classify Czech, Slowakian and even Polish as one
language, but no-one question the legitimity of the seperate wikis.
According to many scolars, West Lauwer Frisian and Saterland Frisian are
dialects of the Frisian language, along with North Frisian. Some do,
however, consider it a separate language. Let me point out the differences
and similarities.
Westlauwer Frisian has, like Hollandic Dutch, only two genders: gendered and
neuter (de man, de frou, it ding). Saterlandic has three (di Mon, ju Fauene,
dät Diert). Westlauwer Frisian lost, again along with Dutch, its cases,
while Saterlandic preserved its dative and accusative cases. Westlauwer
Frisian has a complex system of diphthong which are the consequences of an
elaborate breaking process during the early Modern Age; this process has
left Saterlandic totally untouched; instead it developed other
mutation(ljibbe - lieuwje; swiet - swäit; leaf - ljoof). As a result,
Westlauwer Frisians and Saterland Frisians cannot understand each other,
unless they studied the other language.
Another important difference is in the vocabulary: Westlauwer Frisian draws
on Dutch, Saterland Frisian on German. Finally, Standard Westlauwer Frisian
has no official or prescriptive status in the Saterland: If Frisian is used
at all officially (which happens increasingly), Saterfrisian is used.
Maybe I will point this out with some comparative samples in the article on
Saterlandic.
Wouter
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Hi, before I upload words to wiktionary I normally create tables with
the terms and then with mailmerge I create the pages to upload. In this
way it is quite easy to create glossaries together with wiktionary
contents and we have at least a double use.
Now creating the texts of Wikijunior in Italian (to have it then
translated by one of my pupils into German) I created a short list of
the big cats in English/German/Italian - Gerard already passed me the
terms in Dutch. Now what would be really great is to edit this list
online - so that many people could contribute. Then have the possibility
to export into csv-format (with utf-8 coding).
Is there a software around that already does that? I could install it on
my server for now - and of course any wikipedia project could use the
contents as license would always be GNU FDL.
It would be the fastest way to create contents... can you help me with this?
Thank you for any hint!
Ciao, Sabine
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s.cretella(a)wordsandmore.it
Meetingplace for translators
http://www.wesolveitnet.com
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I would like to apply for a Wikipedia in Saterlandic (East) Frisian. Further
details can be read at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saterlandic_Frisian_language and soon at the
requests page.
Thanks in advance,
Caesarion
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Can we use images from
http://digitalgallery.nypl.org
which are clearly im the PD by age, e.g., from the American Civil War?
Magnus
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Dear all:
I would like to request a new Wikipedia for classical Chinese or kanbun(
漢文/文言文) which is the standard form of Chinese for about two thousand
years and was used throughout East Asia as the formal form of writing. Its
importance in East Asia is like that of Latin in Europe. Now that
Wikipedias are running or being started for many of the languages in East
Asia, it seems that the language which is the backbone of these languages
should also have a place.
One problem that might be encountered in writing articles for kanbun
wikipedia is how the foreign loanwords (e.g. from English) should be
phonetically transcribed when there is no corresponding word in kanbun
itself. If they are transcribed using kanji (Chinese characters), there is
the question of which language should be used to read the kanji. Here I
suggest using an alphabet system of East Asia (e.g. Japanese kana or Korean
hangul, or Taiwanese chu-yin) for the transcription and also note the
original word in English (or any other language of origin or the roman
transcription if the language is not written in roman alphabet). This
allows kanbun users speaking different languages to know the original
foreign word.
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